“I know one to the north, near Lake St. Louis.” Wiin had acquired the habit of pointing at directions with the compass in wiin’s hand. “But that route would take you closer to open sea, which you said you’d rather avoid.”
“And their town surely won’t be as organized as this one,” added Bridget, and Samuel could have sworn she regretted saying that one favorable thing about the missionaries.
“At least the traders have something of use to offer,” said Odahingum. Wiin kept walking, and the others followed.
“Ah,” said Samuel. Odahingum raised an eyebrow, and he explained, “Up to now, I was trying to ascertain whether you hated us.”
“Why would I?”
“Because we’re Europeans too.”
Odahingum made a sound that could be taken as either a chuckle or a grunt. “What a simple person you must think I am.”
“No, no, no, I think I figured it out,” Samuel hastened to add. “You’re fine with us as long as we don’t start preaching. Am I right?”
“That’s not fair,” protested Bridget.
“What, you’re still thinking of our parents?”
Somehow the air abandoned the warmth of spring. They all could hear the change in her breathing, and Samuel silently cursed himself for having broken weeks of successfully avoiding the one topic that united them. Bridget turned toward him, and he could already read what she would say. This was the moment; this was the conversation they had been trying not to have. “You mean to tell me you haven’t given them any thought?”
Samuel tried to think of the most effective way to end the argument, and could only come up with the worst line of attack. “What we’re doing here is not about them.”
She grabbed him by the coat. “Then what are we doing here? Why did we risk boarding a ship to America? Of all the ways we could have escaped, why did you agree to the one plan that involved completing our parents’ journey?”
He took a nervous breath. “I’m telling you it’s not about them. Our lives don’t begin and end with the Mayflower. The world will keep going.”
“I can’t.”
She saw he had no response to that; she wasn’t expecting one. She had shut off her sentiments so deeply that now she could only intuit the vaguest image of what she wanted. Indeed, since John’s death she had forgotten her ability to want. The Mayflower had so prominently inhabited her fancy that she’d never envisioned what life would come after reaching shore. She had crossed the unseen border of her childhood dreams. As if asking for the next piece of guidance, she gave Odahingum a pleading look, but wiin, who had not heard of the Mayflower, nor would wiin ever need to, could only give her a tentative smile of commiseration. For the first time she faced the prospect of not having her destiny written for her.
All this was finally becoming evident for Samuel, and against his lifelong revulsion for his fellow human, he opened himself. “I’m doing this because I’m incapable not to,” he whispered. “I came here with you because you had lost everything. Years ago, when I lost everything, no one was good to me. At such times one can easily believe that nothing good can happen. I wanted to give you what no one gave me; I was watching you at your lowest and most hopeless, and I thought I could do one good thing. That’s something we still have, even when life crushes us, even when there’s nothing left; we can try to do one good thing.”
They wept in each other’s arms until it was no longer painful, and they started the walk toward Lake St. Louis.
After they had fished and eaten their lunch, Odahingum slowed down wiin’s pace to let Bridget open some distance ahead of them, and said to Samuel, “I don’t mean to intrude, but what was that discussion about?”
“You’ll find it very silly.”
“I wouldn’t think that of you.”
The sincerity in wiin’s voice touched a fiber in Samuel, and he savored the feeling until he remembered wiin still wanted an answer. “If you think the friars are bad, you should have met our parents. They convinced themselves that they were on a holy quest. They told us so many stories. We were supposed to stay alert against the dangers of this world. Dreadful things could happen if we didn’t leave Holland before the truce with Spain ended. We had to be prepared to flee into hiding before hordes of inquisitors came hunting for us.” He gave himself a moment to calm down as the memory of childhood terrors resurfaced. “I guess when the truce ended, and nothing happened, the congregation lost much of their fervor.”
“But she didn’t.”
“She can’t. I shouldn’t blame her; this is what has sustained her all her life. She must hate me for betraying our elders.”
Wiin stayed in silence for a while. “Sometimes you do have to disagree with your elders.” Samuel’s face showed surprise, and wiin went on, “I don’t know what you have gone through. But I know about being surrounded by people who try to teach you to hate yourself.”
“When did something like that happen to you?”
“My father sent me to the mission school when I started to grow up and it became evident that I wasn’t going to become a woman or a man. My mother explained to him that I’d been born with two spirits, and he thought that meant I was possessed.”
Samuel shuddered. “The friars must’ve been no better help.”
“I survived.”
“That word is too small for the meaning it has to carry.”
Odahingum had an inkling of a lifetime of suffering behind that reply. “Earlier, you wanted to know whether I hated you.”
“If you knew the dirty trickery that sent us here—”
“I’m not interested in whom you have lied to,” wiin said, extending a hand to hold Samuel’s. “Today, you have let me see more of the truth about you.”
Samuel felt his blood race with a pleasant warmth, but his first impulse was to resist it. “The whole truth about me may be too much.”
Odahingum, with wiin’s hand still on his, gave it the gentlest squeeze. “Let me have it. All of it. Let me be someone who doesn’t hate you.”
Morning, May 16 (Gregorian), 1637
Lake St. Louis
On the way north they met an old friend of Odahingum’s, a fellow Ojibwe, who had recently passed by the settlement ahead of them to sell fox skins and assured wiin that it was not currently besieged by plague. In fact, according to him, the Jesuits were busy expanding their presence in the region, building mission after mission in a frantic effort to avert another disaster of the proportions they’d seen in China. Even if it meant coming face to face with the Protestants in New Netherland and Nova Dania, they were determined to not fail again.
The man also told wiin, and wiin translated for the Fullers, that the Jesuits had built a stone bridge across the river that led to the lake, to connect the disparate houses that surrounded it. It was by no means as big a lake as the Ontario, but the river was nonetheless wide, and with the bridge it was now possible to start thinking of those houses as the seed of a future city.
For that information, Odahingum gave him two beavers wiin’d trapped back upstream, and they resumed their journey.
They came to know that they were close, even when still no houses were visible to them, by the fervorous reverberation of a voice that could only correspond to a sermon. They walked past squirrels and hares that ran from their approach but had until then seemed oblivious to the resounding stories of hell and perdition, and the closer they came to the settlement, the more horrific the words became. They still couldn’t see who was issuing such threats, but Samuel, who for the past days had been stealing short glances at Odahingum to savor the multiple beauty of wiin’s face, noticed at once that wiin’s countenance had changed.